6 Reasons To Lose Weight That Have Nothing To Do With Fitting Into Your Skinny Jeans

If you’re carrying a little extra weight, you probably already know there are a host of health-related reasons to slim down. Even small changes on the scale can improve blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, diabetes and heart health.

But those aren’t always the benefits that are the easiest to see or even visualize — especially when compared to something very, very concrete, like how your favorite pair of skinny jeans fits.

Getting to a healthy weight is worth it for so many reasons, but here are a few convincing ones that have nothing to do with what you see in the mirror.

You’ll sleep better. At a recent presentation at the joint meetings of the International Society of Endocrinology and the Endocrine Society in Chicago, researchers discussed their findings on the effects of weight loss on sleep — and the results were positive. They found that obese adults who lost 5 percent or more of their bodyweight reported getting more and better sleep after six months of weight loss. Of the 390 study participants, those who lost at least 5 percent of their bodyweight had gained almost 22 minutes of additional sleep per night, while people who lost less than 5 percent of their bodyweight gained only about one additional minute of sleep.

Slimming your waist may fatten up your wallet, according to a 2010 study from George Washington University. The researchers calculated the costs of medical bills, missed work days, low-productivity work days, short-term disability, workers’ compensation and other personal costs and found tangible financial differences between overweight people and their healthy-weight peers. Annually, being overweight costs women $524 and men $432, and being obese costs $4,879 and $2,646 for women and men, respectively, according to the study.

You may feel less pain. Carrying excess weight can create or worsen joint pain for two possible reasons: Being overweight increases stress on the joints, and it may increase inflammation throughout the body, which can in turn lead to additional joint pain, according to Harvard Medical School.

In 2011, Australian research found that among obese men with diabetes, losing 5 to 10 percent of their bodyweight led to improvements in erectile function and libido, Health.com reported, likely because of the strain obesity puts on the heart and blood vessels. However, ego and self-esteem may play a role too, New York Presbyterian Hospital psychologist Stephen Josephson, Ph.D., told Health.com. “People need to feel good about themselves [to] overcome performance anxiety and other things in the sex arena, and sometimes it’s as simple as getting into shape,” he said.